Blog feeds for Gamers and Developers in the GarageGames community. http://www.garagegames.com/ 2008-11-19T22:15:50+00:00 text/html 2005-09-24T11:02:15+00:00 Byron Atkinson-Jones http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/9780/8785 Coming from a background where I started my coding career on a spectrum and C64 Torque 2D is going to allow me to realise my old dreams of games that I never got around to coding. But, good as it is Torque 2D is not quite where I need it to be so I am going to attempt to extend it...<br /><br />I only came across Torque 2D very recently and after a little mulling around I finally took the plunge and bought a licence to it. I was quite lucky in that I had bought a licence to TGE when it first came out so I could opt for the $80 version.<br><br>Why did I take my time in making a decision?<br><br>Snobbery really....<br><br>I work in games and its difficult to get out of the mind set of needing to create a game that will appeal to the masses and hence need to be 3D. I wanted T2D because I started out on the C64 and there were a few games that are 2D in nature that I wanted to create - just for me... if anybody else likes them then that will be a bonus!<br><br>Anyway - I have it now... so what next?<br><br>Well, one of my first tasks is to integrate my Flash player into the core C++ code. For some bizarre reason my career in the games industry has led me to the position that I always end up involved in the GUI code for the game and every game I worked on re-invented the wheel and created a new GUI system and a new GUI editor. This seemed like madness to me so I began to experiment with using Flash as a GUI editing system for games. Eventually Serenity Interface was born. This is a cross platform 'flash player' (in quotes because it is not a flash player in the same sense as the Macromedia Flash player - Serenity Interface is designed for low memory cost and high performance games.. especially console development and does not use the native SWF format, rather it converts from SWF to its own format) which means I can now design all my game GUI's in Flash - which for me is cool!<br><br>I have no idea how difficult a process the integration into the T2D core will be but it should be fun!<br><br>I am guessing this is going to take me through most of the major sub-systems in T2D and I especially looking forward the scripting integration.<br><br>The result? I can at last realise those old dreams!